Cranberry oat muffins

October 23, 2014

A few years ago, when I was living in Southampton, England, I searched the entire city (it was small) for cranberries. I kept leaving stores empty-handed, but I eventually found a bag in the frozen department. At the time, I was making cranberry-orange cookies to share with my friends at a Thanksgiving Day feast. The mix of the sweet orange juices and tangy cranberries was oh-so-perfect. I mean, they were lick-my-lips-and-hand-me-a-dozen-more, delicious.

So when I spotted a box of real, whole cranberries at Whole Foods last week, I immediately threw them in my cart.

As predicted in my previous post, my life is hectic right now. On Tuesday night, as I was coming home from a late night at work, I called my mom. She listened as I complained about: how tired I was, how stressed I was, and how overwhelmed I felt. She was patient, as she always is, and gave me some advice: take the night off from work/packing/studying and do something fun. Seems trivial, right? But at the time, it didn’t even occur to me to take a break – I just wanted to continue tackling my evergrowing to-do list.

After I got home, threw down my bag and changed, I immediately headed to the kitchen. Baking is my happy place, my distraction and what I do for fun. This may be a healthy recipe blog but boy, do I love to bake. The muffins turned out really well – the mashed bananas (I used bananas that were about 1.5 weeks old and really smooshy) and coconut oil add a lot of moisture to the recipe. I also took the sugar down to a very small amount (too small for me, actually) but added a small drizzle of honey across the finished product to attain my desired sweetness. There’s also a little crunch from the pecans and a burst of tang from the cranberries. And the best part? They’ll fill you up!

*These are actually better after they have cooled/stored for a day.[br]**The sugar content in the nutrition information is based on the recipe WITHOUT the honey

3.2.2807

See these four muffins in the pictures? These are the only ones left…I had some help, but I mostly ate them myself over the past three days. Oops! Okay, back to packing – have a lovely weekend!

Side note:

For those of you who subscribed to receive posts via email before 10/22, I have good and bad news for you. Good news: I’ve switched services after experiencing too many email delivery issues the past few months (thank you for your patience if you received multiple emails or emails out of order.) Going forward, delivery should be seamless! Bad news: you will need to resubscribe using the form → on the side bar. Going forward, you will not receive posts to you inbox unless you resubscribe. You can also (re)subscribe below. As always, thank you so much for supporting Just a Pinch!

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About Lauren

Lauren Rice, MPH recently graduated from the Coordinated Dietetics Program at the University of Washington. In January 2017, she opened Nutrition Elevated, her anti-diet, #bodypositive nutrition counseling and consulting small business (www.nutrition-elevated.com).

Hello and welcome!

I'm LAUREN, and I started Just a Pinch in 2014 when I was applying to graduate school to become a registered dietitian nutritionist. In 2017, I started my own small business, Nutrition Elevated, LLC, to help share the breadth of knowledge I learned as a nutrition graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle!